More Talk, Similar Action

A month in Korea. I've been letting the days go by and the time has flown; guess I must be having fun. But the less I say about Talking Heads quotations the better, I'll just make this up as I go along.

This weekend started with a fun excursion up north (far enough north to be about 10kms from that other Korea) for some Saturday go-karting. I forgot how fun those things are. I remember when I was a kid too young and scared to ride the karts at Splash and Put and how dad loved them. When I finally got up the nerve to ride them, he gave me tips about the right way to go around turns quickly without slamming into the walls, but there's only so much skill with which a child can tackle a hairpin.

But now age and independant recklessness have come into play, and I had a damn fun day of slipping and sliding around the track. Sure I'm a big kid, but that's news to few. Of course, being too pre-occupied with driving, the only picture I took was of the questionable grammar on the starting line banner. Twost? Secost? I wonder how the firnd turned out.

On leaving the track, some random puppies lured us onto a sidwalk to play with them and take pictures and wonder why they were out in the middle of town like that with no apparent owner. I theorized that it may be kind of akin to the fish restaurants where you get to pick which live seafood you want to eat, but mostly just as a tasteless and culturally insensitive joke. Just so we're all clear though, you can get dog here, to eat. Far be it for me to judge, though - we eat animals that are sacred to some folk. Sacred and delicious. You can really taste the holy.

Mike tried hitchhiking, both as a fun picture opportunity and as a little joke about how long it was taking for us to find a cab driving by. But we caught a cab to the station and trained our way back to Seoul.

That night me and Ben hit the Zepplin bar and got to talking to some Korean guy who took us to meet a supposed memeber of the Korean mafia and we ate cold octopus (or squid, I can't remember) and drank Soju (think cheap rice vodka, for anyone who doesn't know) and the old maybe-mafioso shouted and screamed shit in Korean and was genenrally an asshole and me and Ben got too drunk and I went home and eventually tossed those tentacles out the apartment window.

The traffic image isn't the veiw from my window or anything, by the way. It's just a shot from one of the subway stops on my way home from work, and I like the way it looks, and it's one of the few pictures I've taken in the past week.

Speaking of the relative lack of pictures, I figured I'd share some more images of my happy-but-small apartment. It seems I find myself... living in a shotgun shack, so to speak. Just check out my kitchen here. Or should I say, my porch/kitchen/laundryroom. It's nice to have it in a seperate room though. Some of the other studio apartments here just have the one room with a bathroom on the side. That means sleeping where you cook things, and that's just not right.

Yeah, I said 'cook things'. It seems I'm not the culinary involate that I once was. Despite having the crappiest stovetop in Korea (some electric glorified-hotplate, while everyone else gets gas. Childish giggle.) I actually make my own food pretty often. Taking-out is still a viable option, though. So is delivery...

See, these are all little magnets that delivery places put on my door. I've been collecting them. It's kind of sad, I get a little excited smile when I come home and there's a new one to add to the collage. It's too bad they're completely useless to me, since I can't read Korean nor speak enough of it to try and order food and have it delivered to my house. It's pretty easy to go walk somewhere and get a bite to eat, anyway.

Oh, that little banner image at the top of this entry is from one of my favourite Korean TV commercials. I'm pretty sure it's for a delivery place, but the whole thing is basically just this funny-looking guy stuffing his face and looking very pleased about it.

And that's pretty much it. Funny how the week on which the least happened left me saying the most. I'll have to address that, pronto. After all, this only happens once in a lifetime, right? (I think that's the sixth Talking Heads reference. Sixnd?)